📡 from Manchester to your inbox

Nov 22, 2020

Hello and welcome to Pulse — the weekly techie/businessy newsletter from @perspectiveix. I’m your host, Ben, and I’m working on something new. Click here if you’re interested.

Now, let’s not waste time; jump in.

🗞 NEWS

iOS apps on macOS with Apple M1 silicon [link], TikTok mansions go public [link], and a Fleets’ bug made them available for 30 days [link].
Apple trying to water down a bill, Teams enticing Zoom users, and a birthday [link]
Nvidia to rescue Fortnite, Google goes for encryption, and PayPal’s Generosity [link]
App Store’s cut reduced, Google Pay’s update, and less Fleets [link]
New features in your fav apps, Huawei’s honor, and Amazon’s next disruption [link]
GitHub brings back youtube-dl, Obama on the biggest threat to democracy, and the podcast war [link]
Parler, Amazon’s geography fail, and Turkey against Google [link]

🪱 a gift for you.

from Manchester to your inbox — post-move - Credit: Pulse Writer 😅 on Unsplash

📊 STATISTICS

Stories at Close to A Third of Instagram Ad Spend

Stories’ share of Instagram ad spend showed a marked increase in the third quarter of this year, per the latest quarterly digital marketing report [download page] from Merkle. The study reveals that, among Merkle’s clients, 29% of total ad spend on Instagram was invested in Stories, up from 22% in the first two quarters of 2020.

It’s not just share of ad spend that has seen an increase when it comes to Instagram Stories. Stories accounted for more than one-third (35%) of the total ad impressions on Instagram in Q3. This is up from 30% in Q2 and 28% in Q1. Merkle notes that due to lower than average CPMs, Stories remains a “cost-effective tool for driving brand engagement.”

Top Homescreen Widget Apps Have Reached 1 in 7 U.S. iPhones

When Apple’s iOS 14 launched two months ago, it introduced homescreen widgets to iPhone and iPad for the first time. According to Sensor Tower Store Intelligence data and modeling, the top five most popular widget apps have been installed on an estimated 15 percent of U.S. iPhones.

The five most popular homescreen widget apps, which include Widgetsmith, Color Widgets, Photo Widget: Simple, WidgetBox, and Photo Widget, have collectively seen 13 million iPhone installs from the U.S. App Store since iOS 14’s public release on September 16. Their downloads peaked during the week of September 21 when they reached 3.8 million installs. So far in November, they have hit 1.7 million installs. Globally, the five apps have collectively reached an estimated 45 million installs to date.

📱 TOOLS & APPS

Lulu: a free, open-source firewall that aims to block unknown outgoing connections, protecting your privacy and your Mac!

a free alternative for Little Snitch.

Grammarly: the world’s best grammar checker

nothing new, but it’s always worth reminding others about grammarly.

TheTrueSize: compare the size of different countries

it’s pretty interesting.

🔍 SPOTTED

Microsoft is working on the possibility of reporting a concern about an email received in Outlook for Android [link]
Netflix might be adding a sleep timer [link]
Instagram is working on a new filter for Direct’s inbox: Close friends [link]
Instagram is working on Camera Settings [link]
Twitter is working on Auto Blocking [link]
Twitter is working on a setting to select when to upload high-quality photos [link]
Twitter keeps working on the Audio Space feature. It will be possible to invite up to two people (currently) to speak in your Space [link]. Here’s where audio space creation button will probably appear on iOS [link]; and here’s a GIF about it you might wanna see [link]